Edvige Giunta (Translated by Alessandra Bava)

Edvige Giunta

Vignettes/Storielle

Translated into Italian by Alessandra Bava

Ciuzza

Nonna Ciuzza wouldn’t have left her house even with an earthquake. It suited her. But once my father persuaded her to spend the summer with us at the garden, she and the cripple. It was the summer they boiled pears and locked doors, sulked and left my mother’s food untouched. They walked slowly from their room to the dining room, always together, wearing thick black dresses below the knee, shapeless and frayed. They never sat outside to enjoy an evening al fresco.Never wandered the garden’s paths, stopping to pick apricots or peaches. Never bent to pick a lily, a carnation.

Under the full moon, the orphan boys of Piazza Armerina waited. I was nine and wore old lady glasses, the most expensive from Contarino’s shops on the Corso. My sister was thirteen and as bold as I was mousy. Pina, our cousin, was the blonde beauty. After we climbed out the window in the cabin where my mother and younger siblings slept, we ran down the dark dirt road all the way to the orphanage where a dozen boys stood in the moonlit yard. We clustered, anxious to see the lupo mannaro that howled in the belly of the night.

She has become the face I paint on the edge of sleep. I want her in my dreams where I believe she’s still alive. My dreams have lost the heaviness of sorrow. I long for my nocturnal appointment with the dead. Last night, though, after I fell asleep on the sofa, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, my husband and son by my side, a voice jolted me awake, injecting words that were mine and awareness, real and dreadful. My father is dead. Breathless, I understood mortality like never before. And then that wisdom was gone and I knew nothing of dying.

These days she, who always complains about the laundry, is relieved by the chore. She walks into her son’s room and bends to gather sweatpants, socks, underwear. Then to bathroom, almost grateful for the small pile her husband forgot on the floor. In the laundry room, she sorts everything: whites, darks, delicates. She even hand-washes a few items. The spinning of the washer is as soothing as the hum of the dryer and the feeling of clean, still-hot laundry she folds and organizes in neat piles, then puts away. It reassures her. It makes the world momentarily predictable. Good. Safe.

Sausage ragu’. Bean soup. Mushroom and shrimp risotto. I am my mother, late 1970s-early 1980s. Once she came to see us in our student apartment in Catania and the fridge was empty. She laughed and got to work. Even when we longer lived with her, she kept feeding us. I understand now her urge to feed your children, even toglierti il pane di bocca. It’s a gasp, an emptiness, a fear of starvation so old and primal that drives me as I fill bag after bag of food for my daughter. “Take it all,” I want to say. “Take it.”

I didn’t like to call her “Nonna.” It felt like a betrayal of my real grandmother–and a lie. There was something cavernous about her: those deep-set eyes that pierced through me, sunken cheeks, toothless gums. When she grabbed me with long skinny fingers traced by green, thick, protruding veins, I knew she was deceptively old and weak. I felt her territorial claim, like when she would say, “I love you because you’re blood of my blood.” I knew she wanted to squash that part of me that came from the woman her son had married.

Below the field of daisies, a cliff, and the Mediterranean. I wasn’t afraid of heights then, didn’t experience the vertigo that now a balcony on the third floor will trigger. I come from people who live on balconies. Elbows resting on fences, they follow the bustle below. Even my agoraphobic grandmother and aunt loved their balcony, the only open space they didn’t fear. There are no balconies in my American life. No passeggiate on the Corso. Yet, with a beloved girlfriend, I perform a virtual passeggiata. Her voice loud and clear through the speakerphone, she slides her arm into mine.

The husband makes her coffee every morning. Sometimes he brings it to her in bed. A white cappuccino cup with hazelnut milk, espresso, one tablespoon of Brain Octane. On a saucer. He doesn’t care for saucers, but she does. She appreciates the love, the care, the concern. She used to bring coffee to her father when she was a girl. Depending on the moment, his gesture–receiving the small espresso cup in his hands–could be raging or intimate, acquiescent or impatient. It dawns on her that he never said thank you, grazie. Gratitude was never part of their transactions, which today she misses, while leaning on her elbow on the unmade bed, she sips this odd American concoction she calls coffee.

Evidge Giunta is a Professor of English at New Jersey City University. Her most recent books are Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo and Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora. Follow her on Twitter @edigiunta.

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Alessandra Bava is a poet and a translator from the Eternal city. Her work has appeared in journals such as Gargoyle, Plath Profiles, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Tinderbox and Waxwing. She has translated into Italian many poets from English and French, among them Jack Hirschman, Michel Butor and George Szirtes. Her Anthology of Contemporary American Women Poets, with poems by Nikky Finney, Joy Harjo, Patricia Smith, Natalie Diaz, Diane Seuss and many others, is upcoming.